For a few seconds he said nothing. Instead, he stared straight ahead of him, alert, certainly, though less anxious than just plain curious.
Then, gradually, what had at first been uncaptioned curiosity did begin to turn into a nagging anxiety after all.
He called out, ‘Hello there!’
Then, after a lengthy pause:
‘Hello!! Why don’t you answer?’
And then, after a much shorter pause:
‘Who is that? Come closer where I can see you!’
The instant the shot rang out, he fell like a stone.
Chapter Eleven
‘Depends. Depends.’
Trubshawe was speaking. He stood with his broad, bull-necked back to the fireplace, but at an oblique angle to it, concerned as he was to avoid blocking its warmth from the drawing-room’s other occupants. In contrast to the glowing fire, the pipe that permanently dangled from his lips was also, so far as anyone could recall, permanently unlit, to the point where you began to wonder if you’d ever actually seen it emitting smoke. Like many a man of his age, he wore that pipe rather than smoked it, and it had become as indispensable an accessory to his self-presentation as the Vicar’s dog-collar or Cora Rutherford’s tonitruous tangle of bangles.
Who knows what comment, or whose, prompted so typically cautious a response from him? ‘Depends. Depends.’ It could have been his motto, his ‘legend’, as the French affect to call it.
He had spent his whole career being dependable. It was obvious, even to those who had only fleetingly crossed his path in the line of duty, that he’d never been one of the Force’s star detectives, that no tabloid reporter had ever dubbed him ‘Trubshawe of the Yard’. But he was what the Great British Police Establishment is most comfortable with – the type of investigator who arrives at the solution to a problem (he himself would instinctively have avoided the word ‘mystery’) not through some ostentatious lightning-flash of inspiration or even imagination but by simply, doggedly depending on others to point him, often without their actually realising they were doing so, in the right direction.
He would pose a question, listen politely and patiently to the answer, then listen a little more, then still a little more – oh, he had all the time in the world! – until the hapless suspect, intimidated by the prolonged silence, even feeling obscurely responsible for it, proceeded to blurt out all sorts of things he never intended to reveal. And it’s then, one imagines, that this temperamentally slow and, yes, plodding man would pounce – in his fashion. He would move in for the kill, just as patiently and politely as, earlier, he had laid the ground and set the trap.
Sherlock Holmes he therefore was not. Yet in his stolid, even boring way, he had probably nabbed many more criminals than any number of glittering practitioners of the venerable craft of detection.
As for the ffolkeses’ guests, having spent the last forty-five minutes or so resting in their rooms, they were now seated comfortably at the fireplace again, increasingly engrossed, from the sound of it, in their own humdrum affairs.
‘Oh, there you are, Farrar. Everything quite satisfactory downstairs?’
‘Yes, Mrs ffolkes. The servants seem to be bearing up rather well considering.’
‘Considering?’
‘Considering the state they were in when the body was first discovered.’
‘Oh. Oh yes. Yes, of course. They were in a state, weren’t they?’
There was something not altogether natural about Mary ffolkes’s voice. Resembling nothing so much as an elderly butterfly, if such a creature can be said to exist, she had always been a fussy, fluttery woman, ever terrified of the Colonel’s ‘moods’, those vocal and too often public exhalations of his famous fiery temper. If there was one thing she dreaded in life, it was a ‘scene’, though in her case such a ‘scene’ might amount to no more than a couple of raised voices at the dinner-table. But now, when she spoke, a hoarseness of articulation combined with an unusually hesitant delivery suggested she was labouring under some more extreme strain.
She stood near the tall french window, noticeably apart from her friends, and even from the far end of the room she could be observed agitatedly toying with one of the knotted tassels with which the heavy drawn curtains were fringed. Every so often, too, when she thought no one was looking in her direction, she would tweak the curtains apart and steal a swift glance out on to the moors. Then she would just as swiftly draw them to again and, sporting a brave smile, turn cheerfully – just a tiny bit too cheerfully – to face the company.
After a moment she spoke again:
‘Sorry, Farrar, but would you happen to …?’ she started to ask.
‘Yes, Mrs ffolkes?’
‘Would you happen to know if my husband has returned?’
‘Uh, no.’
‘Ah. Well, thank you anyway.’
Then, pretending she’d had a belated afterthought, she added, ‘Oh, and Farrar …’
‘Yes?’
‘Did you mean – sorry – but did you mean he hasn’t returned or did you mean you don’t happen to know if he has?’
‘Well, he may be changing, of course, but it’s not likely he could have come in without anyone hearing him. His being with Tobermory and all. And, you know, the way – well, the way he has of always slamming the door.’
‘Yes, yes, of course. You’re right, of course. Just my foolishness.’
And yet she couldn’t prevent herself, not nearly as furtively this time, once more tweaking the curtains open and staring blankly at the empty, desolate landscape which stretched away from the house.
It was hard to credit that no one else had noticed the gradual alteration in her demeanour, that no one else had sensed the hysteria locked up inside her like a genie trapped in a bottle. But then, even at the height of a crisis, normally constituted human beings appear to require next to no excuse to revert to their natural state of self-absorption, as witness the fragments of chit-chat which were drifting round the drawing-room and from which it could be gathered that, in the absence of anything to be urgently debated, any collective decision to be taken, the ffolkeses’ house-party had all gratefully subsided into the pre-murder routine of their various quotidian rounds.
The Vicar and his wife, for example, were huddled together in a private confab. For all one knew, they were discussing how they were ever going to confront the future under the cloud which the events of the last twenty-four hours had cast over their reputations. Or they could just as well have been sticking mental pins into a mental effigy of the terrible Mrs de Cazalis.
Those two wicked witches of the West End, Cora Rutherford and Evadne Mount, were having a high old time puncturing the pretensions of mutual acquaintances in the interconnected worlds of plays and books. From time to time a mot from one or the other would make itself piercingly heard above the general babble – ‘Yes, he was short, the little runt, but not as short as the shrift I gave him!’ (that was the novelist) – ‘Her own hair? Not bl**dy likely! By the look of it, it wasn’t even her own wig!’ (that was the actress) – followed by a cascade of tinny tee-hees from Cora Rutherford and booming haw-haws from Evadne Mount.
Then there were the Rolfes. They were seated side by side on the sofa nearest the fire, next to a collection of carved wooden figurines, about a quarter life-size, all of them representing darkies in fezes and topees – postmen, stationmasters and other minor colonial dogsbodies – which the Colonel had brought back home from one of his African trips. When he was not distractedly fingering one or other of these peculiar statues as though greeting a deputation of pygmies, Henry Rolfe would squeeze his wife’s hand tight in his own, while she could be seen raising a finger to her eye – was she actually brushing away a tear?